Today the internet is very different to it used to be. Several years ago, if you made a website you were assured of visitors as there were so few sites on the internet. Now, with several hosting companies having over half a million web sites on their servers it is much harder to get the visitors. Just recently, the search engine Google announced it had information on over 2 billion web pages.

Luckily it is not all bad news. Today there are over 200 million people on the internet and thousands of people are getting connected every day. The main problem you will face is getting your site noticed above all the others because, even if you have the best site ever, nobody will know that until they visit it.

Where To Start

There are thousands of places and ways to publicize your site. Basically, you must think to yourself, "How do I find sites?" The first thing you are likely to think of is Search Engines. They are the first place you should publicize your site. Secondly, you probably follow links from other pages. This is a very important way, which we will cover in more detail later.

To publicize your site well, all you need to do is follow this tutorial. We cannot guarantee that your site will be very popular after this but you should certainly get enough visitors to make your site worthwhile.

Preparations

Something a lot of people don't do right when publicizing their site is that they don't prepare properly. Anyone can submit their site to a search engine but there is a lot to do before you do this.

First of all, make sure that you know what your website is about. Although this sounds silly, a lot of people find that they don't really know a category their website could fit in (for example Webmaster Resources). You will need this once you start submitting to directories and link sites. If your site has many separate subjects, promote them one at a time.

The second thing you should write is a description of your site. This should be short, about 20-30 words. There are several things that are quite important about your description:

Never write anything like "The best site on the internet" or "The coolest site around" because it probably isn't and people aren't fooled that easily

Don't Begin Each Word With A Capital Letter

DON'T USE ALL CAPITALS

Write your description in the 3rd person. For example don't write "We offer several free services to help your business." Instead write "Here you can get several free services to help your business."

Once you have written your description, save it in a text file somewhere. You will need it later. Next you will need to come up with some keywords. These are the words which people will use when searching for your site. You should have about 20-40 of these. Type them into a text file separating them with commas. For example a site offering credit card processing for small businesses might have keywords like:

Put your 5 most important keywords first. It hasn't been proved to increase your search engine ranking but some search engines have a limit to the number of keywords you use so you can make sure they are not cut off

Never repeat a keyword. Search engines will consider this spamming and will not index your site

Try to think of alternatives to some words. For example, in the keywords above, both the words business and company were used

Include plurals of words in your keywords but don't take out separate ones for them. For example, you wouldn't take out the keyword company so that you could include the word busine
sses

Save your keywords to a file as you will need them very soon.

Finally you should make sure you have a descriptive title for your site. An example of this is, instead of calling a site:

Football World

you could call it:

Football World - Teams, stats, results and match reports

This will help your search engine ranking and help people to understand what your site is about.

Meta Tags

The next thing you will need to do is create meta tags. These are a bit of code which goes at the top of your site. It will tell any search engines the description of your site and the keywords.

Creating your meta tags is easy. You can use our very own Meta Tag Creator (see related links). All you need to do is paste the description and keywords you wrote into the appropriate boxes. It will display your meta tags on screen and e-mail them to you for future reference. It will also tell you how to add them to your site.

What Now?

Now you are ready to start publicizing your site. In the next part we will show you how to submit your site to the search engines.